by Hector Abad
“We shall do as my godson suggests, and later we’ll see,” said Don Santiago. Father Naranjito made the expression of one resigned to the error of others: he raised his eyes toward heaven and lowered his head with feigned humility. Teresa, Raquel’s sister who had also come from La Ceja, raised her hand and offered to be the teacher. There was also a man, Jorge Orlando Melo, who, according to those who had been walking with him, knew absolutely everything anyone might ask, on any subject. Don Santiago, after asking both of them a couple of questions, named the woman teacher and Melo professor and principal, and had them step forward to introduce them to everyone. One of the first works undertaken a few days later, communally, everyone putting in a day’s work, was the construction of the new school, on a plot behind the future church. Almost all our ancestors who were born in Jericó studied there, starting with Elías (son of Isaías) and José Antonio (son of Elías). The last were Grandpa Josué (son of José Antonio) and my papá, Jacobo Ángel, son of Josué. Not me, though, I was born and raised in Medellín, but with our eyes always turned toward Jericó.
Something that always inspired wonder in travelers who passed through Southwest Antioquia in the second half of the nineteenth century was the healthy look of the people, the great number of children the women gave birth to, and the good size, strength, and posture of the inhabitants. Boussingault admired their strong constitution and Schenck said that nowhere in the republic were there “taller or more athletic figures than the inhabitants of the mountains, or prettier women with healthier colors or such agreeable appearance.” There was no great secret in this, I don’t think, just something very simple: good food and healthy, hygienic habits.
My grandfather said that they taught them at school to think of the flags of Antioquia and Colombia at mealtimes, in the following manner: “We need to eat something white (rice, arepa, grits, milk, cheese), something green (vegetables and salads), something red (beans, meat, fruit, chocolate), and something yellow (eggs, plantain, corn, cassava, arracacha, potatoes, other fruits).” At this point everyone would always ask about blue, and the answer was very simple: “The blue is nothing more than the pure, fresh water from the mountain springs, uncontaminated by human excrement or animal manure.”
The diet of the Antioquia mountains was simple and frugal, but complete and balanced: every night, in every house, whether the women wore fine shawls or rough ponchos, beans were served, an excellent source of protein, which cares for the neurons. Mazamorra, or corn porridge, was always there for dessert, sometimes with guava cake or at least with pieces of panela, or raw sugar loaf, which supplies energy. Beef and pork, when the new farms were cleared, began to be abundantly available, and not all of it was exported to the mines down south. The hard thing was preserving it, but salt was brought in by mule train from El Retiro, and the meat was dried in the sun in strips which would later be ground between two stones. Ground meat, or powdered meat as we’ve always called it, sprinkled over beans, sometimes crowned with an egg fried in pork dripping, was the most appetizing dish in the world, especially when complemented by ripe plantain, baked or fried in slices, which gave a sweet touch to the whole meal. At midday they might add that same powdered meat to the rice soup, which would have a bit of chopped potato in it, and on a separate plate some slices of ripe tomato with grated cabbage, cilantro, and a squeeze of lime, and ripe avocados if they were in season. And always a white or yellow arepa on the side, the way they’d have bread in the Old World, because, as a German traveler put it, “where corn doesn’t grow, neither do Antioqueños.”
The clothing, according to descriptions in documents from the time, was simple: “Men wore pants and a long cotton jacket, a palm-straw hat, like a Panama hat, but locally made (in Aguadas or Sopetrán), plus a poncho and the indispensable carriel, the shoulder bag typical of the region. Women wore short skirts and the same hats as the men, their hair in long braids hanging down their backs. Some wore black merino wool shawls with long silk fringes. Everyone went barefoot, rich and poor, and only wore shoes, which they found tight and bothersome, for very special occasions.” My grandfather always told us that his grandfather, despite being one of the most important men in town, always went barefoot, and that’s how he is in the only full photo of him that we still have, a daguerreotype damaged by damp and mold, in his elegant suit with his calloused, rough feet sticking out.
His great-grandfather, Isaías, with Gregorio – his wife’s brother, who was still a minor and planned to save up for a while before getting married and choosing his own plot – began to clear the first piece of land he was awarded. They could saw the best trees between the two of them, but they didn’t know what to do with so much oak, comino, and cedar wood. Since they didn’t want to burn it, they piled up the logs under a roof, to protect them from the rain, to wait for the day when they could use the wood. After chopping down the trees and hauling away the logs, they burned the stubble that was left, and planted the first seeds in the ash-enriched soil, plantain, corn, beans, arracacha, and potatoes. After two crops they let grass grow and put two or three black-eared, white calves on the patch. Meanwhile they cleared another patch of woodland. What they grew was mainly to eat, but they would also take some of the products to the new town, on mules, to sell on market day, or to exchange with artisans for tools, or for work with recently arrived young settlers.
In the yard of their house in town, which over the years became a walled-in garden, the Ángels constructed a pigpen where they fattened swine on leftovers and products from La Judía and La Mama (the first two farms they cleared) they couldn’t sell on market day: worm-eaten carrots, potatoes drilled by mojojoi, moth-nibbled beans, extra plantains. Every six months, drivers arrived to take the pigs down south to the gold mines, where people didn’t produce food, but money, and it was easier to get a good price for them. That’s why it was so important to keep the road to the south clean and paved – at least in the worst sections – for without that road there was no way to get their products out. In the other direction, the road, which came from Medellín and rose up over La Cabaña from the Cauca, began to carry fine timber. The Santamarías and Echeverris charged a tax for the wood or animals taken down the road. All merchandise had a fee to be paid. Many years later, at the edges of town they planted the first coffee shrubs, and those plants arrived with the promise and the dream of a product that, finally, would give them something more than mere subsistence.
Cultivating coffee had been the idea of a visionary priest, Father Cadavid, who arrived in Jericó in 1875, to replace Father Naranjito, and through his tireless initiatives had been like a third founder of the town. He was an energetic man full of ideas who had read about the fever over that drink in Europe and the United States, and so he distributed plants to many campesinos and taught them how to use the seeds and grow the crop. In Jericó, as in other parts of the country, he also ordered the penitence of planting hundreds of coffee seedlings, or thousands, if the sin was a very grave one. The paradox was that after a number of years the very sinful people did a lot better than those who never sinned. A few years later Father Cadavid was the one to import the first coffee thresher, and there they bought the crop from the campesinos. Elías, the firstborn son of Isaías, was one of the first to grow coffee, on the highest part of La Oculta, which was his father’s then and he would inherit at his death, soon afterward. He planted so much coffee that in town he was known more as a sinner than as a coffee grower.
The people of Jericó were conservative and puritanical: they did not tolerate billiards, forbade cockpits and bullfights. Adultery was not easy in a town where everyone knew everyone by first and last names. There were only three prostitutes (María Medallas, Malena, and María Esther) who lived together on the outskirts – ruled by the old madam, Margot, who had retired and become an adviser on intimate matters and a successful businesswoman – and who took the virginity, at the end of the nineteenth century, of nine out of every ten teenage boys in Jericó. Since ol
d and young men owed this debt of initiation to them, they were tolerated with certain sympathy, as one tolerates a beauty spot on one’s body. Even the wives thought it better that their husbands and sons unburdened themselves with public women than with their neighbors’ wives.
Not everything was easy, because there are wise guys and barefaced liars everywhere. There were some very clever men who took advantage of the stupider ones, or the needier ones, and gradually accumulated lands, bought at a pittance, or sometimes through illegal sophistry, in order to get control of greater expanses. The cemetery began to fill up little by little, because old age and diseases arrived. Widows were the ones who most often had to give up their lands at the price they were offered, or old couples who’d lost their sons to the civil wars and didn’t have the incentive or the means to hold on to the land. Others hadn’t done well due to bad luck (there was a plague that destroyed all the tobacco leaves in the hot lowlands), or even due to laziness. After a while, some sons of those who had been property owners were day laborers (earning very low wages), or renters or sharecroppers on other people’s lands. There were even cases of poor cousins working for rich cousins.
Isaías Ángel had arrived young, vigorous, and full of dreams at twenty-four years of age. By forty-two he had seven children (two sons and five daughters), La Judía and La Mama in full production, and the straw house in Jericó had its wooden walls thickly plastered, the poor stools had been replaced by furniture carved out of the fine wood from his own lands. Toward 1880 the small village was becoming a fair-sized town, one of the fastest growing in the whole republic, with almost ten thousand souls. His eldest son, Elías, who had arrived in El Retiro traveling in total comfort in the warm womb of his mother, was now twenty-one years old – he’d just reached the age of majority – and had received a basic education at the school from the now very elderly Melo.
The first Ángel born in Jericó, above all else, was agreeable, honorable, and hardworking. From La Mama, Isaías, his father, had worked his way gradually down toward the Cauca, clearing the trees and underbrush, and had discovered a spot with good air and a good view, full of crystal-clear waters, halfway between the chilly uplands and the tropical lowlands. A hidden spot. Which is why, when he bought it, quite cheaply, from one of Don Santiago Santamaría’s many sons, he called the place the hideaway, La Oculta. That happened, as I’ve said already, on December 2, 1886, and we still have the papers, handwritten by a notary in Fredonia, in the voluptuous calligraphy of the time.
EVA
When a man is a womanizer they say he’s successful with women; I would say, rather, that he has had success with none of them, because the good thing – I suppose – would be to fall in love and stay in love. All my life I’ve felt sorry for Don Juans. In this sense, I could say that my life with men has been entirely successful, or rather a complete failure, a failure of success, a disaster, depending on how you look at it. Although I’ve fallen in and out of love many times, I’ve never been a Doña Juana. I always fell in love looking for someone who would bring out the best in me, at the same time as I would bring out the best in him, and I’ve fallen out of love when I’ve seen that it wasn’t worth it, for they didn’t know how to give or receive, or they didn’t love me the way I wanted to be loved, or they didn’t like the way I loved them. I had all the men I loved, at least for a while, even though they were later frightened by me, by my freedom, and by the way I am, and they ran away in terror. We women can have many men, as many as we want, or almost, but we don’t tell anyone, because it does us no good.
Not Pilar. Pilar is made of different stuff, older, tougher, the stuff of my grandmothers or my aunts, the ebony or carob wood of my great-grandmothers. The only man she’s ever had is Alberto. And, like my aunts, like my mamá, and all my grandmothers going back as far as you want, all she does is improve her garden, pray, look after her children or grandchildren and arrange the house, cook, and decorate. She was never interested in studying. Less in reading: she reads little and slowly. Talking about politics gets on her nerves and strikes her as bad manners. Religion is a bad subject as well, she doesn’t like to argue, and is simply Catholic like her elders. She crosses herself and goes to Mass like she gets dressed or drinks water every day: it’s a duty and that’s all it is, something she doesn’t think about or argue about, she just does it, like brushing her teeth. She thinks divorce is a huge stupidity, according to her, marriages always go from bad to worse: the second husband is worse than the first, the third worse than the second, the fourth worse than the third, and so on and so on until you end up in a solitary old age. Just like the husbands. For her the important thing is to choose well the first time and stick with it. Her recipe for long-lasting marriage is very simple, she says, and according to her our Grandma Miriam gave it to her before she got married: “Mijita, always say yes to your husband, never contradict him, but always do what you want to do.” That’s how she is with Alberto, she never contradicts him and never pays him any mind.
At the farm, with us, something very similar happens. She always says that she’ll do what we decide between the three of us siblings, after arguing for hours and hours, but then she does whatever she wants, and since she’s the one who lives there, she always gets her way. She spends her life arranging the house and the surroundings in a continuous frenzy, like an ant constructing or reconstructing her anthill, untiring. She caresses the house the way she caresses her husband. I think she sometimes knocks things down so she can spend her time putting them back up again, injures to cure, because the worst thing that can happen to her is to have to keep still. She drives poor Próspero crazy with requests: move this for me over there, help me clean this wall, let’s whitewash this section of that wall, bring a pair of pliers so we can pull these nails out, let’s move those staghorn ferns to another tree, let’s plant a basil bed, another of cilantro, and one of parsley, plant some peppers, melons, and eggplants, chop down that tree, cover that window, oil the hinges of the stable doors…Anything not to keep still. And she goes racing off to Medellín, flying in the jeep when her children or grandchildren, friends or husband, call her, to help them with something.
Pilar, when she’s not arranging things in the old house, is embarking on improvements and changes to the landscape, moving fences, flattening hills, pruning trees or planting trees, planting a new type of coffee with higher yields, combatting the beetles that eat the hearts of the royal palms, moving stones from one place to another, canvassing the neighbors for contributions to repair the road, which always gets damaged by the winter rains. And if she’s not busy with those things, she’s helping someone who’s ill, taking an injured person to the hospital, bringing a midwife to an expectant mother, or preparing a corpse, though only when it’s someone in our own family or someone very close to her heart. Doing favors, giving gifts, helping others’ lives to be a little easier, turning her own into madness. I see this for a single hour and I get exhausted just from watching her. No, I’ve never wanted to be like that.
* * *
When I was very young they invented safe, latex condoms and the pill, feminism grew in strength, but none of those inventions had any influence on Pilar: she never used any methods of controlling her fertility, not even the rhythm method, and she had all the children God chose to send her and she always thought feminism was an exaggeration that was going to mean the death of marriage. For me it was different: the pill and antibiotics took some fears away, and feminism made me aware of how men had oppressed us (when Pilar was born, women didn’t even have the right to vote yet), and I’ve always been freer with my body, although I’ve always taken care of myself, and I didn’t do with it what my grandmothers would have recommended. I resolved that I was not going to be the way women have always been in my country: slaves to men and slaves to themselves, to their desires to arrange their domestic worlds and nothing further, to their husbands and children, instead of helping to improve the whole world.